


Stripes of Gold

by ClockworkCourier



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Tumblr Ask Box Fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-14
Updated: 2016-06-14
Packaged: 2018-07-15 01:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7199834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkCourier/pseuds/ClockworkCourier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There’s only so much he can do, only so many hours spent tracing invisible signatures on his skin, pretending there is a name there, a soul out there in their strange little world that will find him someday, that he’ll share a lifetime with. His family, his friends, they don’t know what it’s like now, the fact that even though he’s angry at fate or destiny or whatever it is that assigns souls to each other, he still can’t help looking at his wrist every morning when he wakes.</p><p>Yet he still hopes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stripes of Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Just a speedfic from tumblr from wordsoffblankpages who asked for 'Could you do something fluffy with the survivor from Fallout 4 and Hancock?' YA BETTER BELIEVE I COULD. Except it's not super fluffy, because I apparently have a horrible condition where I can't do fluff for the life of me, but also one where I'm obsessed with soulmate-identifying marks. Anyway, it was super fun and here's the much nicer, cleaner edited version. It's also a little canon-bent for my needs and purposes so fite me (ง'̀-'́)ง 
> 
> Title from 'The Outlaw Josey Wales' by Zella Day. It's like my go-to Hancock/Sole Survivor song. <3
> 
> (And Max is absolutely named after Max Rockatansky. Bless her little post-apocalyptic heart.)

When John McDonough is seven years old, he sits on an ancient lawn chair, facing the riverfront and watching the sunlight dance on the surface. It’s one of the days that they go down to the river when it’s safe enough, to get out of Diamond City for awhile. His mother hums a song he’s never heard while she patches one of his brother’s coats. He sees her left wrist, loping cursive forming _Patrick McDonough_ over her skin, his father’s signature prominent. John’s run his fingers over that signature a million times, it seems, on top of the freckles of his mother’s wrists, something he shares with her. Just as well, he knows that her precise calligraphy adorns his father’s wrist. There’s a curt, striking signature on his brother’s as well.  
  
John’s wrists are bare.  
  
He looks at them, watching the water and the sun cast reflections on his bare arms. He sees the same arms, wrists, hands, and fingers that he looks at every day. He knows each freckle, each mole, each scar. He sees the thin pale white streak below his right palm from where he burned his hand on a wood stove. There’s a similar one on his left index finger, leftover from a prank on his brother gone awry only a year ago. There’s little else to observe, and certainly no name.  
  
Martha McDonough glances up from her sewing project and smiles. The sun on the water plays with the auburn in her hair. He’s blond, like his father, but his mother looks at him with blue-green eyes to match his.  
  
“Still looking?” she asks.  
  
He doesn’t say anything, but he nods. She knows that he’s been looking every day since he discovered what the names meant. Most of his friends have names scrawled on their skin, and it’s at least a little bit of a relief that some of them don’t. It means that their other half hasn’t been born yet, but that also means that John is at _least_ seven years older than his.  
  
His mother just smiles beatifically, and reaches out with one arm to pull him close to her side. He leans in, presses his face against the worn-soft fabric of her dress, and breathes in deep. She smells like Abraxo detergent, flour, and sunshine, and it makes him smile. She’s as warm as the sunlight on his skin, and being this close to her makes him forget about the blank space on his wrist.  
  
\---  
  
When John is thirteen, he becomes bitter. The space is still there, yawning empty against the fishbelly-pale underside of his wrist. His brother teases him relentlessly about it, as do his own friends. _You’re gonna die alone,_ one of them says, but only before John silences him promptly with a fist to the nose. The boy simply drops to the ground, keening like a dying molerat, and John feels a little justified.  
  
Only a little, especially when his mother gives him _that_ look.  
  
But she doesn’t know, he thinks. She has his father’s name on her skin, and John’s brother has a name, too. They don’t know how much it hurts, how lonely it feels. Even his youngest friends have names now. There’s only so much he can do, only so many hours spent tracing invisible signatures on his skin, pretending there is a name there, a soul out there in their strange little world that will find him someday, that he’ll share a lifetime with. His family, his friends, they don’t know what it’s like now, the fact that even though he’s angry at fate or destiny or whatever it is that assigns souls to each other, he still can’t help looking at his wrist every morning when he wakes.  
  
Yet he still hopes.  
  
\---  
  
John is eighteen, and he doesn’t look at his wrist anymore, at least if he can help it. He’s beyond the stage where he would glance down, a traitorous part of his mind letting his heart skip a beat at the thought that he might see black scrawl in the corner of his vision. That part of him is closed off now, dead and buried like Patrick and Martha. He and his brother buried Martha only a week ago.  
  
He wears long sleeves after that, filched sweaters and dirty jackets. The sight of his own bare skin doesn’t make him think of the thing he never has or never _will_ have. It makes him think of his mother instead, the gentle writing on her wrist, the smell of her and the sight of the sunlight catching the red in her hair. He doesn’t _want_ to think of her anymore, since he’s just another wasteland orphan, out there in the great glowing emptiness with only his brother at his side.  
  
In enough time, as with all things, he won’t even have that.  
  
\---  
  
He turns twenty-one in a haze of Jet and whiskey. There’s a pretty girl in his lap, moaning and mewling and pawing at his bare chest while they sprawl out on a beaten-up couch in some low level chem den. She gyrates against his hips, giggling and licking at him with any variation of obscene noises, and he just barely registers it. He manages a weary smile, his free hand not cradling a Jet inhaler manages to fall on the gentle curve of her waist. Her skin is so soft, and he doesn’t miss the smell of mutfruit on her.  
  
Then, he turns his head to kiss at her shoulder, and he sees her wrist. There’s a name, of course, and it certainly isn’t his.  
  
All at once, there’s a sour taste in his mouth and a leaden weight in his stomach. He knows better than to shove her off, as he’s never been that rude, even when he’s high. He does close up on her, though, shutting down so abruptly that she reels back a little, whispering, “John?” in a voice too sugar-sweet. He hates it, hates the way her voice grates on his after he spent half the night chasing her, hates how unfair he knows he’s going to be.  
  
He drops the inhaler and lowers his hand to her wrist before pulling it up so she has to look at it.  
  
“He’s still alive?” John asks, his voice just a drugged drawl.  
  
The girl’s eyes flit between her wrist and his face. She chews her bottom lip. “John, babe... I don’t wanna--”  
  
“Tell me.”  
  
“Yes,” and it has the weight of the most painful admission. He sees the heartbreak in her face, the coquettish brightness fading away like footprints in sand.  
  
She’s still in love with him. That much is obvious. And why wouldn’t she be? Soulmates never fall out of love with each other. They can drift, and they certainly can fight, but they wouldn’t carry the names they have if they didn’t love each other at the end of it all. This girl is no exception, and there’s no reason that she should be on his lap when there’s a kid out there who would love her better.  
  
“Go to him,” John manages, and his voice just sounds so tired to his own ears.  
  
She doesn’t say a word. In fact, she doesn’t even spare him another glance. The girl just picks up her jacket from the dirty carpet and tosses it over her shoulder, leaving him surrounded by empty alcohol bottles and used inhalers and needles.  
  
It might be the chems, or it might just be him, but John swears his wrist burns.  
  
\---  
  
Years pass, and between the chems, the alcohol, and himself, John forgets how old he is. Days blend together in a place like Goodneighbor.  
  
But he doesn’t forget what his brother has done.  
  
John thinks he might be around forty or so when he makes his choice. He’s as conscious as he’s ever been when he slides the needle into his arm, watches the horrifically radioactive green fluid move down the metal and into his skin. His veins light up with its presence, and he sees it travel through to his wrist. As his vision blurs, as he feels his _everything_ burn, he can almost pretend the glow spells a name on his skin.  
  
\---  
  
He tells himself that ghouls don’t carry the names of their soulmates on their skin. Names would rot off, or be lost in the twists and bends of mottled flesh. He tells himself this, but to some degree, he doesn’t believe it’s actually true. There are other ghouls that he knows, and they have names etched like tattoos, clear even against the decomposition and scarring. Even with this in mind, he tells himself that he isn’t alone, even when he feels like he’s isolated.  
  
The thing is, he knows for a fact that he’s loved. Goodneighbor loves him, _has_ loved him since the last mayor dangled from the balcony like some grotesque Christmas decoration. The people adore him, and they tell him that often. It makes him feel good, and it’s almost enough to help him forget the enormous pile of shit that seems to dog him. He can pretend that his own brother didn’t cause some kind of ghoul genocide in the town they grew up in. He can pretend that he didn’t have to bury his own parents. He can even pretend that there’s nothing wrong with a bare wrist in a place like this.  
  
People love him. They fawn over him, hang onto his every word, clamor for him. All of this, and yet he still feels that emptiness gnaw at him.  
  
He looks at the burned skin of his wrist, and he pretends that he doesn’t feel like he’s going to spend his eternity alone.  
  
\---  
  
God only knows how old he is when he sees _it_. He might be fifty, or younger, or older, or _something_ , and he might even be dead because he never thought there would be a god _damn_ day in his life when he would see it happen.  
  
He wakes up one morning, the sunlight casting his room in gold, and he sees a name on his wrist.  
  
_Max_  
  
Three letters, no last name. But it’s a _name_ , and for all those years where he felt angry, or empty, or depressed, it doesn’t even _compare_ to the glorious elation that kicks his heart into gear, sending it rattling at so many beats per minute that there is no way to keep track.  
  
John launches out of bed, holding his wrist out so the sunlight catches it, as if the light is going to make it disappear. The name stays, as black as pitch, scrawled in loping handwriting so exact and lovely and it makes every nerve left in his skin _sing_. He doesn’t know who is attached to that name, guy or girl or something in between or neither, but he also doesn’t care. He doesn’t even care that it doesn’t make any sense for him to be the age he is and for _what_ he is and for a name to appear now. Forty or fifty-something years older than his soulmate? Well, weirder things have probably happened.  
  
And it’s his luck that Nick Valentine is in town, because John Hancock has to know, and Nick is just the guy to find out.  
  
\---  
  
_Nicky._ Hancock’s not the kind of person to praise the Institute for... well, _anything_. But he does allow himself to send up some kind of prayer of thanks to the powers that be for the synth.  
  
“You know, Hancock, you’d be exactly the kind of guy to get into a situation like this,” the detective mock-laments as they sit nearly knee-to-knee at the Third Rail. There’s one beer between them, and Nick forgos it even though he ordered it. Hancock suspects he ordered it so that his client would be distracted.  
  
“Yeah, but Max _exists_ , right?”  
  
“Oh, yeah, she exists.”  
  
_She_. The word conjures thousands of images at once. Hancock’s never really put much stock into what his dream girl would look like, but he allows himself that little bit of luxury. Not that he’d care at this point, especially when it comes to his soulmate.  
  
Nick gives him this sidelong glance, a grin curling at the corner of his mouth, like he’s in on some great big joke. “She’s older than you, by the way,” he says.  
  
\---  
  
Max is two-hundred-something years old when they meet. She comes into Goodneighbor, Piper Wright trailing her steps, and Hancock watches as that thug idiot Finn goes up to her and tries coercing her into some cap-groveling scheme. Hancock won’t take it, _can’t_ take it, especially when it comes to _this_ girl. As long as his heart’s still hammering away in his chest and he’s got her name on his wrist, _no one_ is going to threaten her.  
  
He skulks out of the shadows, his switchblade a cold but comforting weight in his back pocket, and when he gets close enough, he really _looks_ at her.  
  
He comes to the conclusion that there is no way that this girl could be meant for him.  
  
She’s drop dead gorgeous in a wasteland-eroded kind of way. Her hair is a dark red-auburn, darker than his mother’s was, cut in a practical, rough pixie style with one side shorn shorter than the other. When she looks up at him in surprise, he sees her eyes are the same gray as the clouds above them. There’s a galaxy of freckles that cross her nose and her cheeks, and in a moment of pure fantasy, Hancock imagines tracing them in the morning light, making constellations of them. She looks young, maybe twenty-five, and she still has the gentle curves that suggest that she once lived a much better life than the one she’s living now.  
  
When Finn hits the ground, blood oozing slow from his stab wounds, Hancock makes eye contact with her, and all his fears are assuaged in a matter of seconds.  
  
Max, beautiful, radiant, downright _pretty_ Max smiles at him and holds out her right hand, and he can see the black etchings of a signature on her bare wrist.  
  
_John Hancock_  
  
It takes every last ounce of his willpower saved up over the decades not to mow her down in the tightest embrace, to kiss her breathless and senseless, to tell her that he’s been waiting his entire life for this moment. It’s mostly doubt that wins over, staying his proverbial hand, believing that there’s absolutely no way she could love a ghoul like him, even if she wears his name proudly.  
  
There’s so much he wants to say, so much he wants to _do._ He wants to say how long he’s waited for her, how he was so sure for all those years that he would never meet his other half, how she’s literally a goddamned _miracle_. Instead, it’s all tamped down and he gives her the most diluted, watered-down greeting he can. He holds out his own hand to her outstretched one, her signature displayed like a priceless work of art embossed into his own skin, and he smiles.  
  
“You alright, sister?” is all he can say.  
  
When she takes his hand in hers without flinching, without blinking, without any indication whatsoever that she might be uncomfortable, he knows that they’ve started something.  
  
And he has absolutely no intention of letting it stop.


End file.
